Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Hur hur, Orks is best and Bad Moonz is da bestest!

So glad to have stumbled upon this! Sub me!

For skin tone, I like mine a bit bright yet natural. I tend to layer up from Knarloc Green to almost yellow highlights. I layer some Sepia wash in, and that's how I like it. When I'm done, it looks like this http://www.miniwargaming.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=5680&hilit=+gebo.

pretre wrote:Lootas are good for things that are flying (BS1 is not far off from BS2) and popping transports so you can get at the juicy center.

Meh. Look at it absolutely here. 150 points buys you 10 lootas. They get an average of 20 shots. Against fliers an average of a bit more than 3 hit. Against AV11 fliers, that's 1 or 2 HP per round of shooting. Not bad, of course, but not stellar, especially given that your opponent has at least one turn to shoot at the lootas before they run, which will cut down on their number of shots, and likely cause a morale check that they're not going to be terribly likely to pass, especially if you take lootas in smaller squads than 10.

Plus, I've got wazdakka, who has a 4-shot S8 gun that can fire while he turboboosts behind the thing to shoot at its rear arc.

Also, to keep more in line with fluff here, for the same points as those lootaz, I could take 4 rokkit buggies, or nearly 5 shoota buggies. Against AV11, they're putting down .8 of an HP (but with a 1 in 11 chance of blowing the thing up straight away (not to mention other damage with a pen)) with rokkits, or half a HP with the shootas. Yes, neither of these are as good as the lootas (though the rokkits aren't that bad), but, combined with all of the big shootas everywhere else, I rather question how much lootas are really needed here.

Ultranick wrote:I have visions of a mad ork warboss riding a massive attak bike pulling a trailer full of grotz! hell you could even nail a few grots onto the cassis for extra armour lol.

So, one of the things that I'm bringing to this otherwise plasticard-intensive project is mad GS skills. One of the things that this will allow me to do is to scratch-build grots en masse.

This is something that I'm more seriously considering as I go - like my army's schtick. I like the idea that if orks are supposed to "infest" the galaxy, that this adjective would be emphasized properly if my ork units are crawling with infestations of grots and snotlings of their own. I'm actually thinking that perhaps that's how my tribe will distinguish wealth and power.

The "new" bikers don't have any grots. The aspiring nobz have bigger tires, nicer guns, and an unnecessary gretchin just sort of hanging out. The nobz have a gretchin or two, one of which is actually in charge of firing the gun (I'm thinking of having nob guns rear-mounted on a pintle, sort of like buggies, fired by grots). The warboss has a grot firing the guns (so the boss can focus on driving and, more importantly, krumping), while he has another, smaller grot firing an unneccessary tinier gun, perhaps front-mounted in a tiny pintle weapon above the front tire. Then you get up to the big boss himself with his bikkelwaggon that has two or three grots firing the main gun, two or three grots firing ancillary weaponry and maybe a few more grots there to play loud rock music, or something. Like, it will be a question not only of how big his bike is, or how big his dakkagun is, but how many little green things he has swarming over his ride.

The theme would obviously transfer rather easily over to other ork vehicles (especially if I make a couple of dakkajets - I can imagine the thing crawling with gretchin making emergency repairs mid-flight and perhaps peeking out of loose panels to shoot handguns at ground targets). The theme would be a rather interesting one to carry over to MANZ, though...

monkeytroll wrote:I can just see a tide of brown leather and dirty white armour coming over the hill.

Don't tempt me. The idea of having a brown ork army with yellow as the secondary color (like with sun wavy things - so a evil sunz scheme, but in brown and yellow, rather than red and yellow) is highly tempting.

The question is if ALL of my armies are going to be brown or not...

Anyways, the main reason I'm posting is to throw up a mini-update. I went through and assembled all my bike blanks with wheels.



Da bike horde beginz!

Over the next week, my main focus is to flesh out bitz on the bike itself. Putting on the extra spikey things, making the handlebars, making the front tire shield and the like. After that, it's going to be making up riders, finishing with fleshing out the last of the detail work, and manufacturing some bases.

Once this is complete, I'll have one of three bike squads done. What my tentative plan is is to make the next big thrust be into the world of nobz. I have 3 squads of 8 bikers, and 1 squad of 9 nobs (remembering that three of them will be leading bike squads, not in the deathstar unit). I don't know if I'm ambitious enough to try and make 9 nobz and bikes from scratch in a single go, but I suppose achieving the impossible with nothing more than believing it's going to be easy is a rather orky way to go about things...

I respect someone who puts together a cool army on a small budget using ingenuity and modeling know wots! Its my favorite aspect of the hobby.

I might need to take notes on how to do a 40k army on the cheap. This should be fun to watch.

Doing an army on the cheap definitely helps with the skills of making whatever you need

So, last weekend I took a bit of time off to make a little terrain. The league I'm playing in right now gives players points for repairing store terrain, and making new terrain and donating it, and the like. As I got started on this project with the help of winning the last league thanks to painting, if I make a small terrain set for the store, it just might give me the boost I need to add a second battleforce to this project, and wouldn't THAT be a hell of a thing.

This weekend, though, I got back on it. I decided to do this front to back, which means I'm starting with the front tire shields. To begin with, I took a couple of the official tire shields off of the sprue. Took some measurements, got a feel for it, etc. I'd post measurements here, but I think it would be rather worthless for this. While the general rule was 2cm from where it connected to the axle to the front of the shield (so, 4cm total from axle to axle), this varied widely based on what kind of a style I was going for.

Put another way, I made some geometric shapes in my .03" plasticard and glued them together to make shield blanks. Here are some examples:



From here, it was a matter of deciding how I wanted them. I thought of doing one with my CSM spikes, one with kind of hedgehog looking things on them. At least one would have the kind of steel teeth on them that the existing ones have. That's actually kind of important here. I want all of my shields to have at least something in common with the ones that came in the box.

Because remember what I said earlier. I know that you can go absolutely crazy with ork bikes and do anything you want, but that's actually a bad thing if you exercise this fact too liberally. Everything still needs to have a theme, and look kind of similar, even when it's otherwise ramshackle.

As such, I copied the riveted tiny steel plates. The rivets everywhere. The holes in the plates, etc. I think I did a pretty decent job of making something that both looks completely botched together using random bitz of scrap metal, while also looking like it's part of a theme. When in doubt, I made sure to at least add the scratch marks to the front that the official ones have.





And yeah, the pictures aren't great. It's hard to make my camera show contrast in plasticard, and it's also deceptively difficult to capture how a 3-dimensional object looks from a single vantage point, especially when they wrap around something else like this.

In any case, I think I'm rather satisfied with the end result. Looks orky.

As you can see, I also took the liberty of blending some of the actual GW bitz in. A great way to make the bikes look more similar is to blend bitz and scratchbuilt stuff together to dilute the effect of the scratchbuilding.

With this done, I think I'll be spending the next week moving back up the bike. This should technically be the guns next, as I'm going to have them mounted up front between the handlebars, but I'm going to have to wait for my next paycheck to buy some plasticard tubing (and perhaps convince my wife it's time to switch from netflix to amazon prime so the A-man gets free shipping?)

As such, I think the next bit to do will be the handlebars. Then the guns, then the riders, then the fiddly bits at the back.

And I've got to make some tough choices about bases...

Goodness, those are looking great!

Yea they are, holy cow. Still though, its the tires Im liking so much

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/blog/426770.page


I don't know if you've read this guy's blog, but he does some amazing stuff with orks, plasticard and bits. It might give you some ideas.

(the building stuff is halfway down the page)

Nice work on the bikes! The wheels look fiddly, but rewarding

So you're secretly a bike mek, yeah?

D